The Light is the Darkness (4 page)

Imogene became curious; curiosity was the definition of her career. Dad was in his cups, straddling the border of utter psychosis, thus when he explained the nature of his research, his hypotheses regarding Dr. Drake’s Technique, its profound generative connotations, and the doctor’s affiliation with some ominous and nameless religious cult whose leaders sought transcendent power, perhaps godhood, she was intrigued, but skeptical.

The skepticism didn’t linger.

Imogene had been the anal-retentive, type A personality, a woman in control, just like Mom. Normally, her comport was smooth and cool as polished steel. She’d taken a leave of absence from her job and was often in the company of a Mexican national, a scientist named Raul Lorca who was in turn a younger colleague of Dad’s. Dad had originally introduced Imogene and Lorca and things between her and the dashing young Mexican took off like fireworks.

Conrad met the guy half a dozen times—the scientist was in his late thirties and excruciatingly handsome. He had a self-deprecating sense of humor and seemed genuinely humble for a celebrated genius. Mostly, though, Conrad knew him from Imogene’s rants about Dr. Drake and the need to assemble allies against that worthy’s schemes. Lorca was a mysterious figure, fast-tracked for the Nobel until a fall from grace, of unspecified nature, led to expatriate status. His research for the Mexican government had been tangentially related to Drake’s own. Like Imogene, he believed Dr. Drake and Dad were on to something, that the Drake Technique might be bigger than atomic theory.

The last time Conrad saw Imogene alive, it was a few months after their impromptu rendezvous at the Monarch Grill. On this occasion she was frazzled, febrile, chain-smoking and pacing the confines of her apartment in San Francisco, the one Conrad loved because it was an oasis in the alcove of a warehouse converted to art galleries and a discotheque.

The apartment was dark and stifling as an untended aquarium. It reeked of musk and alcohol. The drapes were drawn tight and the door resembled a bank vault with its locks and bars and bolts. Her plants were dead, the sink was jammed with dishes and broken wine glasses. More glasses and bottles cluttered every room. Her tabby, the redoubtable Jeeves, had run away to his people.

She dwelt among heaps of paper—reams of hastily jotted personal observations, international newspaper clippings of UFO reports and king-sized envelopes of surveillance photographs of former Drake clients and underlings that would’ve done the likes of Singh and Marsh proud. Astoundingly, she’d acquired a slightly water-damaged ledger from Drake’s defunct research center in Spain—the Cloister had been largely destroyed in an earthquake and the resulting fire three or four years after Ezra died there. Allegedly, Drake perished in the destruction. Certainly there’d been no official sightings of him since then.

The file contained a list of patients and next of kin contacts, research notes and so forth. However, the
pièce de résistance
was a dossier on Dr. Ambrose Drake cobbled from the archival records of the FBI, CIA and INTERPOL. The mother lode, she called it.

Come on, bro! Do you think pop read about Drake in Scientific American? The guy doesn’t exist, really. Nobody knows about Drake except people he wants to meet. Drake contacted Dad, sent him a letter. I saw the goddamned thing; oh yeah, the doctor was so very sorry about young master Ezra, would that he could help, condolences, condolences, etc. At the end he gets to the point, does the soft sell routine, invites the family to his clinic in Spain. Crap! Coincidence? Did he pick Ezra’s name out of a hat? Or maybe it had something to do with pop’s research—the research he was doing on the side, the unfunded stuff. Uh-huh, I bet Drake was extremely intrigued by Dad’s thesis on quantum physics and the theoretical application of micro technology. I mean, hell, that was before nanotech was even a term. Nope, Drake knew what Dad wanted and how badly he wanted it. Ezra was a tiny sacrifice in the scheme of things, if you look at it from Dad’s perspective. He’s a pure philanthropist and they’re the individualist’s worst nightmare. The ol’, ‘if you could end world suffering by killing one innocent’ choice.

Care to guess what Drake’s success rate was with his miracle procedure? Low. The rate was so low I bet the placebo effect covers most of those spontaneous remissions. That center was a roach motel. Drake was peddling poison to the bugs. Or maybe it was worse than that, more diabolical. Maybe those poor little fuckers were sacrifices. Ritual sacrifices on the altar of pseudo science.

Then there’s Dad in his loony bin. You never talked to him after he got committed, you don’t know what he was up to at Grable. A bloody Lovecraft asylum with a fresh coat of paint and cable TV in all the rooms. I guess he received some odd visitors—spooks, government shrinks, scientists of every persuasion. I bribed one of the orderlies to be my fly on the wall. The orderly said our patriarch was in constant contact with foreign nationals. A gaggle of chemists, some of them on the lam, incidentally. All picking his brain about the Drake Technique. Word gets around, y’know. Since nobody’d seen hide nor hair of Drake in years, Dad became the de facto guru. I mean, Drake was older than some of those Nazi scientists living out their golden years in South America. He has to be dead, right? Course he does.

Another weird thing—Dad’s name is flagged at the Bureau. The whole family’s flagged. You too, bucko. It’s a low key watch list. I stumbled across it by pure chance. Makes me wonder why I was ever hired. I mean, picture the Feds hiring someone on a suspected Red list back in the ’50s and you’ll get the idea. Somebody big pulled strings to clear my admission. Doesn’t make sense…or maybe it makes all the sense in the world. Better not touch that right now.

Dad wrote a thesis. It’s called “Imago Effect,” supposedly based on an ancient Greek collection of epistles, some occult tome he got as a door prize from our vacation in the Pyrenees. Dad’s thesis is all about how Dr. D. and friends plan to become gods. Creepy isn’t the word, brother mine.

Dad made a pact with Drake. Dad wanted the answers. He got ’em; see, that’s why the worms ate his brains. Forbidden knowledge, brother dear. Sure as shit wasn’t grief. Know what his part of the bargain was? Know what he did to pay his debt? Mom figured it out, maybe not completely. But enough to make like a banzai pilot. Drake took those children. He ate Ezra and in return gave Dad the keys to Hell. I’m gonna figure out where he dropped ’em and raise a little myself.

Conrad had accepted each proffered scrap of “evidence” with polite interest, infinitely more concerned about his sister’s erratic demeanor, her non-sequiturs and paranoid monologues. She refused to answer the phone; even as they chatted, her supervisor at the bureau office left a brusque message on the answering machine. Conrad got the distinct impression that Imogene was looking into the barrel of a suspension, or worse.

He smiled and nodded, but couldn’t fool his sister.

Imogene’s expression smoothed into that of a statue, a marble queen. She whip-cracked the back of her hand across his mouth, slashed him with her class ring, chipped his teeth with the force of it. He stood mute and stolid and watched the tears make diamonds of her eyes, watched the knot form between her knuckles, a thundercloud of ruptured veins. He said nothing, waiting, because this was as it had ever been; she was irresistible as gravity and boar tides, as a train wreck. His most tenable option, the brotherly option, was to endure the storm.

I was going to kill him. Had it planned out for his birthday. He let that monster eat our brother to advance some goddamned occult hypothesis. But I was too chickenshit to pull it off; convinced myself he wasn’t the one that needed a bullet in the head. Course, he goes and springs a leak in the old ticker. Maybe God sent an angel of death to even the score.

She was falling apart, but what could he do? The family wasn’t much for interventions, historically speaking. He didn’t do anything, in the end; impotent and weak in the presence of her towering rage, her maniacal obsession. She wiped her eyes, sighed, and let him wrap her hand with a towel full of ice cubes. She ordered Chinese; they ate from the cartons because that was safest, considering the sanitation problem with her sink, and come the fortune cookies, her normal acerbic personality had reasserted itself.

Me and Raul are on this case. Drake is listed as deceased in official government records, but Raul thinks the shithead is still out there somewhere, that his cabal of black magic-loving, eugenics-worshipping lunatics is gathering power. I want payback for what happened to our brother. Raul’s gonna help me get it. We may go underground for a while. I’ll call when I can. If something happens to me
… She intoned the cliché with a dramatic wink and proceeded to sketch a course of action. The melodrama smacked of grotesquery because both of them knew something
was
going to happen. It was in the stars.

During a lull in the conversation, he cracked his cookie. His fortune said:
imago, imago, imago
.

Chapter Two

I

Conrad left his island bolt hole and flew to Crete to attend the last supper of his adopted uncle and manager, a dying billionaire named Cyrano Kosokian.

The plane touched down amid a heat wave. A dour chauffeur in a dark suit and rimless sunglasses waited outside customs. He held a homemade sign that read,
Mr. Navarro
. He introduced himself as Sergio, took the bags, and put Conrad in the back seat of an antique Packard.

“Welcome back,” Nikolai DeKoon said from the front passenger seat. This was Kosokian’s major domo of some twenty-five years. DeKoon, an expatriate British gentleman, was lean and pale and dressed as always in a white suit. He projected an aura of effete menace that frightened Conrad as a boy and merely disquieted him as a man.

“Came down from the castle to squire me yourself? I’m flattered.” Conrad didn’t offer to shake hands.

“Special occasion. Uncle is down to hours. Half the people in the airport are likely here for the festivities tonight.”

Conrad had noted the abundance of limousines on the curb and imagined the fleet of them winding along the desolate roads to Uncle K’s abode. He said, “Everybody loves a fucking parade.”

It was a long drive along the coastal foothills despite the fact Sergio kept the accelerator mashed to the floorboard while a tiny national flag on the radio antenna snapped in the breeze. Pavement ended at the city limits and the car was engulfed in a cloud of white dust. The air-conditioner was broken. Conrad had to keep the window cracked and the dust swirled into the compartment and formed a powdery layer upon his clothes.

Eventually, they approached the mountains and arrived in the courtyard of a mansion. A low stone wall crumbled on three sides; remnants of an orchard sprawled in an untended morass. Rocky hillside terraced down to a distant swath of shining water. The mansion itself was decayed into a state of grandiose ruination, slumping toward the stony earth of its foundation.

Conrad climbed out, dusting his hat. A pair of ancient men clad in sweat-blacked dungarees labored to draw a bucket from the well, which sat between the house and a newer timber garage. The pair stood so close to one another, for a moment he savored the illusion they were conjoined. They stared at him with dead-fish eyes, tongues wriggling inside toothless mouths. One wiped gnarled, greasy fingers on his sleeve and began to draw on the rope. Conrad’s flesh prickled at the sight of them, his instinct alerted to some threat it didn’t comprehend.

DeKoon snapped shut his cell phone and said, “Ta-ta for now, dear boy. Urgent matters press. I’ll see you at the banquet, of course.” He alighted from the car and strode quickly away toward a small villa some distance from the main house.

Sergio slammed the trunk. He mounted the cracked marble steps with the bags, beckoned for Conrad to follow. “Your Uncle asked me to bring you directly. He is weak.”

Cyrano Kosokian bore no relation to Conrad. He’d been a longtime friend of Dad’s, although he refused to disclose the details of how they’d met or why they’d stayed in touch. Uncle Kosokian relished his secrets. The joys of manipulation appealed to him almost as much as did the pleasures of brute force. When things went south at the Navarro home after Ezra’s death, Dad sent Conrad to live at this very estate for eleven years. Conrad sulked in rage and despair at being exiled from his sister and his home. Uncle Kosokian had chuckled and said,
You are my apprentice. You are my little pet Kent Allard. The secrets of life and death, pain and suffering, shall be yours. Except, I shall not teach you to cloud the minds of men, but to rip their hearts from their breasts and split their brain pans and eat that jelly like caviar!
To which Conrad had smartly responded,
Hell with Allard, I want to be Cranston
.

He received an opulent private education via tutors. Uncle Kosokian had also instructed young Conrad in the princely arts, including that of warfare and close combat, had groomed him for the clandestine spectacles of the Pageant and its gladiatorial exhibitions—a great and secret show that had played to the tune of obscenely rich patricians since ancient times. The man had participated in the secret arenas during his own sordid youth, had spilled his share of blood. He taught Conrad most everything there was to know about killing men and beasts for sport and profit.